The present invention relates to card manufacture in general, and more particularly to an arrangement for manufacturing and packaging cards, especially playing cards.
There are already known various constructions of arrangements for manufacturing and packaging playing cards, among them such which include a card cutting and stacking station in which printed sheets provided with images on both of their major surfaces are subdivided into individual cards of identical size and the cards belonging to respective sets are assembled into respective card stacks which are then intermittently transported by a chain conveyor to respective corner punching stations at each of which two of their corners are rounded off by punching, after which the card stacks are conveyed to a packaging station at which they are wrapped or otherwise packaged. In one known card manufacturing and packaging arrangement of this type, the card stacks are removed from the chain conveyor at the respective corner punching stations transversely with respect to the chain conveyor, and are temporarily held stationary in the corner cutting station underneath two corner punching blades by clamping jaws. The corner punching blades are mounted on a punching beam which is constructed as a metallic transverse beam. The punching beam can be moved by means of a separately driven crank drive from an upper rest position into a punching position and back again. In this construction, the weight of the punching beam has primarily the purpose of overcoming during the punching operation the friction resistance occurring in the transmission, at the sliding guides for the punching beam and in the sliding bearings of the crank drive and of the punching shaft. The punching operation proper is performed by utilizing the force of an electric motor, whose rotational movement is stepped down by a worm transmission and transformed by the aforementioned crank drive into an up and down movement of the punching beam. Hence, the drive for the punching beam is independent of the conveying arrangement and it is controlled via a braking coupling by the card stacks which move on the main conveyor by means of a microswitch or a light barrier. As a result of relatively huge masses which are to be moved, of the relatively high friction in the driving system, and the slow operation of the braking couplings, it was possible to achieve only relatively low machine operation frequencies when using this known installation. This is so because each machine cycle includes a braking point at which all of the masses have to be retarded and subsequently accelerated again. The higher is the operating frequency, the higher are the inertial forces which increase with the square of the operating frequency.